Inter City Urgent is not simply a service company, we are in the communication business. Information must flow clearly and efficiently between our clients, staff and our couriers and our systems must be simple and cost-effective to deliver our products. It is this simple understanding that differentiates us from our competitors.

I am Ryan Cauchi-Mills, Technology Manager here at Inter City Urgent. Thank you for taking the time to learn more about our systems and why we do things, well, alot different from other companies managing their technology infrastructure.

Dispatch

We were first introduced to a CRM platform called Commence by Paul Holdom of StreetFax. He was taking advantage of this customer management software to allow an amazing amount of information to be shown to an end user on one screen. What if all of your tools - jobs, couriers, customers - were already laid out infront of you and didn't have to open this, maximize that - wait from a form to load?

Our dispatch solution developed on Commence was called EJPS (ee-jips) and was adopted in August 2002. In addition, a clever man named Andrew Charlton developed the first version of a mobile dispatch solution for a Kyocera mobile phone over Telecom's analogue data service. Our drivers simply refreshed their own dynamic wap site on their cellphone to view and update job information without having to take up time using their RT to achieve the same thing. Lo and behold: we found there was far less chatter on the single RT channel we all worked on! We could handle more couriers on one channel and improved accuracy with our first go at mobile dispatch, a revolution back then.

In 2004 I read an article about the new Java 2 Mobile Edition platform that was about to be released onto a new Vodafone Nokia handset - for gaming they said. J2ME could allow us to replace the WAP solution with a mobile phone application that would be faster, allow more error correction and reduce data costs, all of this on a platform that was free to develop on - we just had to learn J2ME. Props to Andrew Charlton for that learning curve too. RingAlert was born - and after countless revisions it is still basically the same application: our drivers receive jobs, they acknowedge, mark as collected and deliver them off their phones with a signatory name. It also allows our drivers to watch their job-time countdown, they can also provide estimated pickup or delivery times from the same application. That got other technologists interested because J2ME could actually deliver a business tool, and we were featured in numerous technology publications here and overseas.

EJPS got an overhaul in 2005 (EJPS2) and we introduced online booking and tracking. Not the prettiest site but it was our first go at writing one - and it got the job done well enough that we had 10% of our bookings online within six months. We gave our clients access to their own personalised address book to speed bookings and setup automated email responses on delivery. Our backend systems were written using free tools such as Perl, PHP and MySQL. The interesting thing about free development tools is they have more development support than the paid ones.

Throughout the years we improved stability and functionality of our dispatch systems. By addressing clients needs, accepting new ideas and implementing them only because we felt we should - not just could. All the time adhering to the notion of KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid. We enjoy a system that tells us whatever information we need to know at a moments notice - if you are an existing client you would smile when you read this as you would be aware how quickly we book your freight and how fast we can update you on the status of your freight in comparison to other service companies. We can clearly see our clients, our jobs - but we were still relying on our poor dispatchers to interpret where their couriers were. Wouldn't it be nice to plot them all on a map? That would be cool...

GPS Tracking

Back in 2006 the theory was GPS fleet tracking would be a god-send to any courier company, but after researching all of the GPS companies out there we very quickly found the theory had a very nasty price tag. Nick refused to increase the cost to our couriers or our customers of this technology when we would be the first to try it out - furthermore the data being returned was too old, around two minutes! A courier could be miles away by then. So I had a look around at what it would take, a GPS aerial, power source, a GPRS modem and software to tie it all together. When finally the Nokia N95 hit the market in 2007 - it had all of those things! So first I had to figure out what langitude and longitude meant, then get my head around what a Kalman Filter was, try my hand at calculating with unreal numbers (I think I skipped a class at high school on that one!) and finally find a way to keep our data usage under 8MB per month per device. Once all of that was testing ok I had to find a map to put it on. Again, the cost of such tools were ridiculous so I had a play with Google Earth to see how that would go - I mean it's free, what's the worst that could happen? Well it worked - so well in fact that we still use it to this day. Our courier's phone software got an upgrade to include our own GPS tracking software (written in J2ME of course) and all of a sudden we were tracking our fleet for no more than it cost us before GPS! Oh, and the data is only a few seconds old now, we can see our drivers in near-realtime.

The Future

Typically, information technology is one of those animals that constantly needs feeding both in time and money. I feel this is only because of the tide of people whose job it is to convince others that technology is close to alchemy and the unknown. It is not, of course, and there are others out there like us here at Inter City Urgent that see ourselves as not waiting for the next technologial revolution but going out and finding it ourselves. After all, the end goal has always been the same - make people's jobs easier, why not do it before your competition?